


And The Creed and The Color and The Name

by TheWoodlandDragon



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Assault, Blood, Discrimination, Domestic Dan Howell/Phil Lester, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Social Issues, Social Justice, Social Media, Suicidal Thoughts, Vampire Dan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 05:26:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11074959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWoodlandDragon/pseuds/TheWoodlandDragon
Summary: For a youtuber with over millions of subscribers Dan Howell was a person with many secrets. Amongst the most guarded was his Vampirism, a condition that was well recognised in medical society but still feared and shunned, for good reason.When a vicious attack left Dan in tatters and threatened to expose his condition to public, Phil was left to pick up the pieces and figure out whether protecting Dan meant shielding his friend from the world, or taking the plunge alongside him with their heads held high, come hell or high water.





	And The Creed and The Color and The Name

For a public persona who splashed his life on the Internet from flashing his starry underpants to hoarding his Crunchy Nut cereal, Daniel Howell was a person with many secrets. Not all were particularly well-kept, because Dan was terrifyingly young and changeable when back when he discovered the Internet and unfortunately the Internet never forgets. At one point Dailybooth felt like the end of his career and the Vday video felt like the end of his world _-his blue-green-yellow tinted skies and seas-_ but tonight he felt miraculously lucky.

Dan fell back gracelessly into his well-worn sofa crease, giggles spilling carelessly from his lips onto Phil’s, arms tangling with the other’s as the elder boy leaned down again, dark fringe tickling his sweaty brow and warm breath ghosting his cheeks. He huffed as Phil tried to nose at him like those little furry creatures in between the soft brushes of their lips, in that instance he was immensely glad that he survived the burn of public scrutiny. That despite the whole Internet knowing things he would never choose to let them, they didn’t know that one secret that smothered all others. That one secret was still, miraculously, only theirs to know.

“Phil…” He moaned, tossing his head back as the older boy hastily unzipped his jacket. “Aw, it got stuck,” Phil said with a sheepish grin, clumsily fiddling with the silver zipper, making Dan groan underneath him. “Oh here you absolute flop, let me…” Dan rolled his eyes and swatted Phil’s hands away, grabbing the hem of the leather and his T-shirt and flipping both over his head instead. “There,” he panted, “Do continue Philly,”, bucking under Phil’s ministrations as he looked up into the heated gaze. Not breaking eye contact, Phil gently trailed his fingers down the taut muscle stripping across Dan’s neck from his jaw to his clavicles, tracing those delicate collarbones, down to his heaving chest, thumbs teasing his nipples with agonizing slowness. Dan keened helplessly, his hands caught in his partner’s messy locks as his fingers flexed of their own accord.

“Dan… Dan…” Phil murmured as he leaned down to lock lips again with the perfect creature in his arms, “You are the most amazing person ever, you don’t even know what you do to me…” he breathed onto flushed lips, his hands leading an electric trail across the quivering expanse of Dan’s abdomen as they ghosted further and further down from Dan’s navel.

Dan moaned and bucked almost violently when Phil’s fingers finally wrapped around their prize. Dan couldn’t help but thrust his hips wantonly into Phil’s hand as his fingers hastily found Phil’s zipper by touch alone, swiftly pulling it down and slipping one hand down his boyfriend’s briefs, the slick hardness rubbing against his palm sending another jolt of arousal straight to his head. Both knew they were hurling headfirst into a fast, messy ending after enduring months of inaction on a tour bus with a full crew.

“Phil, Phil – I –I’m –” Dan cried as he turned his head to the side and clenched his eyes, heat coiling tightly in his groin as he thrust his hips helplessly, seeking more friction towards the inevitable end. He could feel Phil’s movements becoming erratic, knew they were both close – “Hey no D-Dan, please don’t close your eyes –” he heard Phil pant, “Look at me this time, I – I want to see you when you–” He jerkily turned back to face Phil, looking up for one instance, seeing for once the reflection of his own eyes –unnatural red even against Phil’s depth-less blues before he clenched them shut again –he cried, feeling Phil jerk and still abruptly on top of him before wetness flooded his hand, the older boy pressing his mouth to his, their breaths mingling, lips not once parting as he finally pulsed into Phil’s strong grip.

 -----

“Dan,” Phil said suddenly from beside him, breaking the comfortable silence that has settled as they laid side by side on Phil’s blue bedspreads, sweaty and still woozy from their exhilarating high.

Dan hummed in reply, glancing sideways at Phil lazily. “I still can’t believe we did it,” he slurred, mind still buzzing from their tour success, feeling a drowsy grin spreading across his face of its own accord in return to the other’s gentle smile.

“Yea,” Phil said softly, shifting to look at him properly. “We really did it, Dan.” The older boy murmured quietly, impossible blue eyes gazing directly into his own. For an instance those wondering eyes caught the ceiling lights and Dan felt himself drown all over again in depthless blue. “Your… Your eyes, Phil, so beautiful…” Dan barely managed to mumble as he felt his eyelids starting to droop like heavy velvet curtains sliding close on their theatre stage.

“Sleep now Bear, you need it,” Dan heard the other boy chuckle fondly as he got up to turn off their ceiling lights. “Yours are eight million times more beautiful though, Dan,” he thought he heard he sank further into the darkness of sleep, into their soft fluffy duvet draped over his shoulders, into Phil’s warm embrace, his scent and his love. “I love them you know, honey brown or red, I love all of them, Dan…” he thought he heard, and he smiled.

 -----

Morning was overrated. That was the first thing Dan decided the next day as he squeezed eyes shut in the glaring sunlight. He groaned as he tried curl up smaller into the duvet. “Ugh, Phil…” He moaned pathetically, blindly groping around the bedspreads beside him and quickly located his target to deliver an unceremonious poke. His snoring partner barely twitched in his haphazard sprawl half under the duvet. Dan groggily eyed his very jetlagged boyfriend. After a few more moments of flopping around and a glance at his phone showed that it was 15:38, he finally sucked it up and began the arduous task of Getting Out Of Bed.

He felt empty and needing, his stomach growling just then as if echoing his thoughts. He was hungry, Lucky Charms-fixable hungry, but his chest seemed to ache from a different, bone deep hunger.

Dan startled, sitting up abruptly as his head reeled from the sudden motion. Taking a deep breath he shakily ran his hand through his sweat damp curls as he swung his legs over the side of their bed, almost tripping over the sheets. Phil turned around, the snores stilting for a second before resuming their peaceful rhythm. Dan felt the mad fluttering of his heart settle somewhat. Phil has always had such an effect on him, he thought wryly.

He briskly paddled down the hallway to the main bathroom, not bothering to turn on the lights as he immediately looked into the mirror directly at his own eyes. Honey brown.

Honey brown, he thought, sagging with relief, continuing his bathroom and shower routine with slightly less urgency.

Dan had uploaded a morning get-ready video on his channel before but aside from the exaggerated antics, the video left out a minor but significant detail. Each morning the one thing that Dan had religiously stuck to for more than half a decade was not a fringe check as popular opinion dictated, but an eye check.

Phil had made a point of accepting Dan for what he was, even as far as encouraging Dan to open his eyes during sex when he found out the brunette was instinctively shielding himself, for fear of Phil reacting in revulsion in the few seconds where orgasm would embarrassingly flush his irises red with desire before quickly dying back to normal brown. When the Hunger struck on the other hand, the flashes of bloodhungry red would be much more persistent, and Dan always checked the mirror before he left the safety of his apartment, lest he wore the dreaded red hallmark of a hungry Vampire.

The one secret that Dan knew he had to keep, or die trying was his less than popular genetics. Dan first discovered his Vampirism back in 2009, or, as the medical society and the more enlightened would call it, “DDRHS-cis (Donar-Dependent Retrograde Haematopoiesis Syndrome with cis-translocation)”. There were a few more fancy terms thrown around as each would windmill their way inevitably into derogatory slangs, but Dan personally had to admit Vampirism covered it down to the T.

The biology was complex and almost impossible from what Dan could read up in his school library and internet journals, but he gathered DDRHS was a recessive genetic hiccup that resulted in an autoimmune reaction killing off his precursor bone cells –the blueprints for mature blood cells- and leaving his bone marrow grossly ineffective in kickstarting blood production. His lifeline was another genetic hiccup, a chromosome cis-translocation that resulted in modified canines, allowing “DDRHS-cis-translocation” individuals to regularly take in small amounts of mature, healthy blood through their blood teeth, which his marrow could process back into the “blueprints” cells his body desperately needed. Those without the secondary mutation presented similarly to Leukemia haematologically, and despite frequent full blood transfusions they rarely make it to adulthood. Although Dan considered himself lucky enough to have his genetics fuck up randomly not only once but twice, he was nonetheless an unwilling member of a taboo group that normal society would never accept.

And for good reason, Dan thought bitterly as he hastily toweled his hair dry, his chest aching from the Hunger. Throwing on the first shirt he found in his mess of a closet and yanking on an old pair of skinny jeans still lying on the carpeted floor Dan grabbed his wallet, keys and phone, foregoing his hair straightener and breakfast and swiftly bounded down the stairs of his apartment complex.

The tour was terrific but the hectic schedule and constant stream of people made it hard for him to sneak off to blood centres. Although Vampirism was not transmittable Dan would not resort to parasitically leeching off Phil, hence Dan had not had a drop of blood in almost two weeks. Now that the post-tour high was ebbing he was hit by fatigue and craving full force, and freshly returning from a months-long tour meant he had no blood reserves in his refrigerator.

He strode quickly down the street towards the tube station as apparently London was enjoying yet another fabulous traffic jam in his area. A thin sheen of sweat has already gathered on his brow by the time he boarded the Piccadilly Line. Whipping out his phone he whizzed “getting a drop or two brb :)” to Phil before glancing discreetly at his irises’ reflections on the tiny silver of his cellphone case, choosing to scroll through tumblr and leaving the numerous tweets and alerts till later in the day.

Vampirism manifested during late adolescence to young adulthood, in roughly one in every one hundred thousand individuals, but blood sucking was not the most devastating attribute that earned the general public’s scorn and fear. When deprived of healthy blood source for months, DDRHS typically drives its affiliates insane with blood craving, leaving gory incidents littering the news of Vampires biting, permanently scarring or even killing people in their blood craze. Much rarer, but more shattering were hatred-fueled attacks deliberately launched by well-fed Vampires.

Even amongst members like Dan, who were fed under NHS and Red Cross’s ample supply of bagged blood and were almost symptom-free, numerous studies found one to two-fold increase in incidences of various mental and neurological illnesses in the Vampire population, and also an association with lower socioeconomic status, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction and criminal record. A “fragile” neurology, experts in the field generally agreed. “Vulnerable to stressors” if put mildly, or as a more biting neurologist had snarked, “quite defective a brain chemistry from a frankly senseless genotype leeching from society.”

It was a quarter to five when Dan made it to the Oxford Circus blood donor centre. Having grabbed a ticket and a face mask from the nurse he slipped out into the streets into an adjacent back alley to wait in a hopefully inconspicuous manner. He rarely used Red Cross services, opting for the less visible hospital supply, but he was a vamp on a mission and he only hoped no one in the area recognized him.

On retrospect it would have made more sense to stay in the complex.

No one would spare a glance at a boy in skinny jeans sitting in Red Cross’s blood donation centres, his eyes were safely brown, he was wearing a mask, of course no one would notice him, how big of an ego did he have? Was he actually considering being adored and mobbed by total strangers for talking about himself on Youtube when everyone knew what bloodsuckers goddamn get every day? Walking out in the open, a masked guy frequently checking his eyes on the nearest reflective surface every five seconds ever since he was on the tube, nervously fluttering outside the city’s fresh blood supply _in London's back alleyways_ what was he thinking? Or he could have planned responsibly as an adult ought to, made better excuses at the tour, pre-ordered blood packets, it would be expensive but hardly unaffordable, he just didn’t plan it. Or he could have asked Phil to accompany him, it was Phil, Phil who wouldn’t say “no” even if he had the worst headache, it was Phil, one of the few who knew and offered him his own blood and a hug and a place to call his own upon finding out what he was, Phil who mixed him soggy Lucky Charms and mouthed at him badger-style, Phil who said “love you”s and looked into his eyes and said “beautiful” and that he was “worth it”, “amazing” through everything and ohmygod fuckfuck help no please no someone please Phil help Phil PhilPhilPhilPh–

19:25

“H-Hello? Yes I’m Philip Lester. Yes, yes I am. Oh god… You have found him?”


End file.
